At a Theater Near You

It's time for my theatre class's big spring project: writing and performing an original play. I try to give them a head start, though; otherwise I'd hear a lot of "I don't know what to write about!" and "I can't get started!"

Solely for my own sake, I told them to take their inspiration from fairy tales. I even wrote a whole bunch of them on the board to choose from.

"You can change the location, or time, or some of the minor details," I said, "but your play has to keep the main story intact."

"Huh?" "Whaddya mean?" "I don't get it." "Can I go to the bathroom?"

Typical responses, all, so I spared myself yet more heartache and spun out my own example as a model.

"Let's say there's this woman, right? And she's fairly young, and she's small, and she's in hiding. NO! She's in the witness protection program! And one day she's walking through a really bad part of town, see, when ALL OF A SUDDEN this mobster, like, JUMPS out at her, and it's the guy she sent to prison, only he escaped! And now he wants to kill her! And his mobster name is Wolf, right, and she, like, beats him over the head with her purse and runs away. And then she goes to her grandma's house, 'cause her grandma's dying and she had to get special permission from the FBI to go there because you know you have to cut off all contact with your relatives when they put you in witness protection, or else the bad guys would be out killing all your family and the government totally doesn't want to be responsible for that so they take the decision out of your hands. And so this girl--Red, they call her, on account of her red hair--gets to her grandma's house, but unbeknownst to her, Wolf has gotten there first, and he, like, killed her grandma or something, and then dressed up like her; so there's this whole thing with crossdressing, and hijinx ensue. So just when Wolf is fixing to kill Red, like, he's got his gun pointed at her and is about to pull the trigger and everything, IN COMES THIS SECRET AGENT (Code Name: Huntsman), and he totally KILLS Wolf and Red is safe and everybody's happy. Except maybe the grandma, I guess. Maybe Huntsman knows CPR or something, I don't know, but then after the grandma comes back to life--miraculously!!!--everyone lives happily ever after, The End."

I know I made the whole thing up on the spot, but ... I kind of want to see that movie.